Hello!

I recently started running the (Linux) BOINC client on an 8-core CPU.

I notice that BOINC only uses 13.95 MB out of the 2000 MB limit I set (checked after 36 hours, in GUI: Disk-> Total disk usage -> Used by BOINC).

Is that accurate? If so, can't I just have BOINC use a maximum of, say, 20 MB on RAM-disk instead? Right now I notice stuff like firefox takes longer to load, which I assume is due to disk-hogging by BOINC, which runs at nice 19.

EDIT: And firefox runs at nice 0.

Do you want to run BOINC from a USB stick, or do you only want the project files to run from the USB stick?

For if a total package, there are (older) packages out there that allow that, such as Dotsch/UX. Or just throw "BOINC thumbdrive" into a search engine and lots of info will come up.

But if you only want to run the project files from the thumbdrive, then you'll need to do a lot of hands-on work, as it isn't simply pointing the data directory to the thumbdrive and off you go. Well, it is, but under Linux that means editing a lot of (text) files and symlinks.

How much space BOINC picks is of course dependent on which projects you run and how much work you and the project allow BOINC to download. Some CPDN models still use 500MB and more storage space, Einstein will set you back a good gigabyte for the least amount of work, and Seti --with its 100 task limit-- will only use 32MB or 800MB, depending on what you can get and run (multibeam or astropulse).

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I guess I want to run the program from my hard drive (I don't have a spare USB drive at the moment), but I don't want the jobs to generate too much hard drive I/O.

In the example of firefox, its processes gets as much CPU time as they want, but they are still in wait state because (I assume) BOINC uses the HDD a lot in the threads that uses the remaining CPU time, which affects firefox performance.

I don't know if it is just the project files that get manipulated a lot while running?

I suppose I want the project files to be read/written from/to a 100 MB pool in RAM. Would it help to point the data dir to /tmp, which is on RAM? (Assuming I only participate in projects that require less than 100 MB.)

Where do you see that Firefox is waiting for disk IO? Is your HDD led blinking like crazy?

I'm asking because as far as I know, the only times when BOINC science apps create massive amount of IO is when they start up and read very large input files. 13 MB isn't really very large.

(There's exceptions to everything. I think the Clean Energy project from WCG made huge amounts of IO and VM apps might do that as well when they take snapshots.)